The Other Man From Hope

Twice a week, no exceptions, the Huckabees could be found in the pews at the local Baptist church. Young Mike learned the Bible, which he says he still takes literally. (He has said he does not believe in the theory of evolution.) As a kid in the late '60s, though, Huckabee was more interested in music and sports. He jammed with friends on his front porch, plucking bass lines to Rolling Stones tunes. When Huckabee was in fifth grade, he stumbled into his first career. A broken finger left him benched in the Little League dugout, so he wandered up to the press booth to watch the game. When the announcer for the local AM radio station didn't show up, the station manager asked Huckabee if he'd call the game. He did well enough that the manager told him to come and see him when he was 14. Three years later Huckabee showed up for work. Among his buddies, he became a celebrity. "He was on the radio," says Lester Sitzes, a longtime friend. "How many kids could do that? But I guess we weren't surprised. People like him. They always liked Mike."

Huckabee's friends assumed he'd go into politics because of his natural speaking skills. Instead, he surprised everyone by announcing he was going to study theology at nearby Ouachita Baptist University, with hopes of entering the clergy. He says he felt a calling to the pulpit. "Some people thought he was crazy," says Sitzes. "They thought he was throwing his life away … just being some church preacher."

After his first year in college, Huckabee married his high-school girlfriend, Janet McCain. Along with a full course load, he worked 40 hours a week at the local radio station and preached to a small congregation on Sundays. The newlyweds lived on peanut-butter sandwiches and Campbell's soup. "We would alternate between Chicken Noodle and Chicken and Stars," Janet Huckabee says. The couple had a bad scare when Janet needed emergency surgery to remove a massive tumor on her spine. Doctors warned that even if she lived, she could wind up paralyzed or unable to have children. But the operation was a success, and they went on to have three kids.

After college, Huckabee took a job with the Texas evangelist James Robison, a contemporary of Billy Graham's. Robison immediately bought his rumpled prot?g? four new suits. "You're sharp," the preacher told him. "You need to look sharp." In 1980, as evangelicals were emerging as a political force, Huckabee helped put together a convention in Dallas where Christian conservatives met to discuss how they could influence the presidential race. The keynote speaker was Ronald Reagan. "It had a real impact on him," Robison recalls. "Huckabee saw the difference that people of faith can have in a profound way."

A few years later, Huckabee took the pulpit of a small but growing church in Pine Bluff, Ark., and started a Christian radio and TV station, which aired his Sunday sermons. One day a listener contacted him. He was a black teenager and was interested in attending services at Huckabee's church, but worried he wouldn't be welcome; Immanuel Baptist Church had been all white since its inception in the 1890s. "Of course you can come, I told him," Huckabee recalls.

The minister prepared his flock. "I hope that nobody has anything except warm feelings," he recalls telling them. "In fact, if he is not welcome, I don't want to be here either." The speech didn't go over well among some church elders, who threatened to fire him. Several members quit in protest. But most of his parishioners stood with him, and in the years that followed, the church slowly integrated. "I grew up with a lot of people who really resisted integration," Huckabee tells NEWSWEEK. "The more I listened to them, the more I became convinced that racism was an incredible evil." Rex Nelson, who worked for Huckabee when he was governor, says his racial awareness "comes from being raised poor … He knew what it was like to look up at other people who were looking down on him." (Huckabee later carried these lessons to the statehouse, where he pushed to end racial disparity in drug sentencing and urged compassion for the children of illegal immigrants—a position that put him at odds with some in his party.)